Design and Implementation of JSwitch: a Web-based Transaction Coordination Framework

In this paper we present JSwitch, a Web-based transactional coordination systems designed to accept batches of transactions and route them to the appropriate transactional server application that must handle each individual transaction. JSwitch can be used as a framework to implement intra-agency and inter-agency solutions that allows transactions to be exchanged seamlessly. Moreover, JSwitch can be used by a single provider of services as a tool to balance the load among various servers used to manage transactions. These servers might be located at a single site, or distributed geographically, but accessible by means of a corporate intranet. We present an initial implementation of the system, and a performance study that discusses the tradeoff between the different load balancing policies used in the system to distribute the processing of transactional batches. These policies are a) round robin scheduling, b) random scheduling, c) least loaded scheduling, and d) random towards least loaded scheduling. Our performance study shows that this latter provides the best performance for JSwitch